An overdue examination of the Midwest's long influence on
nationalism and white supremacy.
Though many associate racism with the regional legacy of the South,
it is the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation’s most
deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From
Jefferson’s noble farmer to The Wizard of Oz, imagining the Midwest
has quietly gone hand-in-hand with imagining whiteness as desirable
and virtuous. Since at least the U.S. Civil War, the imagined Midwest
has served as a screen or canvas, projecting and absorbing tropes and
values of virtuous whiteness and its opposite, white deplorability,
with national and global significance. Imagining the Heartland
provides a poignant and timely answer to how and why the Midwest has
played this role in the American imagination.
In Imagining the Heartland, anthropologists Britt Halvorson
and Josh Reno argue that there is an unexamined affinity between
whiteness, Midwestness, and Americanness, anchored in their shared
ordinary and homogenized qualities. These seemingly unremarkable
qualities of the Midwest take work; they do not happen by default.
Instead, creating successful representations of ordinary Midwestness,
in both positive and negative senses, has required cultural
expression through media ranging from Henry Ford’s assembly line to
Grant Wood’s famous “American Gothic.” Far from being just
another region among others, the Midwest is a political and affective
logic in racial projects of global white supremacy. Neglecting the
Midwest means neglecting the production of white supremacist
imaginings at their most banal and at their most influential, their
most locally situated and their most globally dispersed.